CFP: Anthology on Sex and Disability (7/1/05; collection)

Disability and sex come together in multiple ways. In thepopular imagination, however, the terms "sex" and "disability" are, if notantithetical, then certainly incongruous. To many, the idea of people withdisabilities as sexual or sexy remains largely unthinkable. We aresoliciting proposals for a cultural studies anthology of essays that willchallenge such conceptions, examining, revising, and extending the myriadways that disability and sex intersect.

We seek submissions that build on existing scholarship on sexand disability but take this work in new directions, attending to thesexiness of sex; to the specificity of disabled bodily enactments,sensations, and experiences; and to the relation between disabled sex andsocial, cultural, and representational structures. While disabilityscholars in the social sciences have made important initial steps informulating conceptual models of sexual access for people with disabilities,complementary work in the humanities or across disciplinary boundariesremains largely undone. In the social sciences and in activist communities,discussions about sex and disability have focused primarily upon local,practical issues: for example, controversies about "sex surrogates,"

arguments about the meaning of "consent" for people with severe cognitivedisabilities, and analyses of strategies disabled people have used to accesssexual experience. In the humanities, in contrast, conversations about sexand disability have emphasized the formation of positive disabled

responses to these representations have predominated. As such, this latterbody of work has arguably been more concerned with "sexuality" than with"sex." We envision an interdisciplinary collection of essays that extendsall of this work, that talks about sex, theorizing it as an embodiedphenomenon and engaging in critical analysis of its social and culturalrepresentations.

This analysis, we hope, will challenge, redefine, and reworkconstructions of either "sex" or "disability" as stable categories. Theapparent stability of either of these categories has historically beenlinked to their containment within private or personal spheres. By forcinga recognition of disability as a political process rather than a privateproblem, the disability rights movement has achieved significant success insecuring disabled people's access to public spaces. But if wheelchair rampsand ASL interpretation are increasingly coming to be understood asappropriate public accommodations, the conjunction of sex and disabilitycontinues to be seen as an improper or unseemly private matter. Wetherefore seek essays that analyze enactments of "sex" in multiple locationsand thus undo the public-private distinction as it pertains to both sex anddisability. Moreover, we are interested in work that conceives ofdisability not as a discrete and stable identity category, but rather as ashifting and contingent set of bodily practices and experiences, whichalways come into being within a broader political context. In particular,we seek writing that investigates the ways in which the politics of race,class, gender, and sexual orientation shape both enactments andrepresentations of sex and disability.